Aside from the columnists we host right here at PTBC, today you should read this must-read by a favorite of mine, Peggy Noonan, who wrote this in this morning’s Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal.com:
They Should Have Killed Him
The death penalty has a meaning, and it isn’t vengeance.
Thursday, May 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP)—Moussaoui said as he was led from the courtroom: “America, you lost.” He clapped his hands.
Excuse me, I’m sorry, and I beg your pardon, but the jury’s decision on Moussaoui gives me a very bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve.
From the moment the decision was announced yesterday, everyone, all the parties involved—the cable jockeys, the legal analysts, the politicians, the victim representatives—showed an elaborate and jarring politesse. “We thank the jury.” “I accept the verdict of course.” “We can’t question their hard work.” “I know they did their best.” “We thank the media for their hard work in covering this trial.” “I don’t want to second-guess the jury.”
How removed from our base passions we’ve become. Or hope to seem.
It is as if we’ve become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we’re just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it’s not good we lose it.
[…] I happen, as most adults do, to feel a general ambivalence toward the death penalty. But I know why it exists. It is the expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of a human life. It says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting of the life of the perpetrator. It is society’s way of saying that murder is serious, dreadfully serious, the most serious of all human transgressions.
It is not a matter of vengeance. Murder can never be avenged, it can only be answered.
Canada should have the death penalty.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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